Punderings

A grab bag of things this week.

• Douglas Hofstadter lectures and books. Sometimes overly intellectual, but often a real delight to read if you think about them. Sadly, I bet my GEB is lost at in my dad’s house (which means: lost forever). HT to someone on Planet Apache.
• OK GO’s This Too Shall Pass is teh awesum! Nice letter by an artist explaining their issues with labels – and one of the biggest Rube Goldberg machines ever set to music (seems even bigger than The Cog).
• Cat humor escaped – better than lol – and was obvious to me, at least, although I can understand that the majority of humans might not get it.
• Unfortunately Storrow Drive is still messed up. No, Virginia, the lane drop outbound at Fenway definitely feels more dangerous to me than it was before – even accounting for incoming Fenway traffic now having a free ride. Yuck.
• MW2 players only: You know you’ve been playing too much when you catch a glimpse of a low flying plane at a certain angle, and immediately think it’s an AC130.
• Engineering Paradise can be true – although it’s often not as kitchy as this most excellent video. Requires a wide mix of geekery to recognize all the jokes and equipment used.
• Note: If anyone has a discount they can pass on to FiOS service to me, that’d be great; we’re planning to switch (but only for phone and internet, not TV). #RCN #Fail too many times. LOL quoted from support: “It’s not unusual for a cable modem to need a reboot every couple of weeks.”
• The best stretch for a tie-in goes to Bret’s Food Writer’s Diary use of Sara Palin merely as a hook to get more readers. If you like that trick and do open source or technology, however, you should really #followfriday @joesuf, because we’re trying to get him more followers than @shanecurcuru this year.

Leading letters go out to The One I Love.

Astute North American winter weather watchers know, as does anyone living on the Eastern Seaboard, that this winter’s weather in the US has been really weird. Not just slightly unusual, but waaaay off in terms of the snowfall expected at various points along the coast – and elsewhere.

The various early snowstorms were not really that unusual – sure, a few records may have been set the first time DC and Maryland were snowed over, but that’s to be expected now and then.

I began to be suspicious that something was up when we had several storms in a row – or rather, not-storms here in Massachusetts, but with real storms in the mid-Atlantic. Having that once is unusual, but it’s been a regularly recurring thing this year.

The thing that tipped me off something was truly out of balance was the complete non-storm earlier this month. A significant storm was forecast for Thursday the 11th. It was a picture-perfect forecast, coming the afternoon beforehand, and resulted in many local schools closing, and various snow emergencies being declared. And then… nothing happened. A few flurries. Very disappointing – well, perhaps not to some schoolchildren!

Now a total mix-up in New England weather forecasting isn’t that odd – happens every couple of days – what was truly out of balance was the parking ticket amnesty declared. Since there wasn’t any snow, but there were a lot of parking tickets given out due to the snow emergency, a lot of people were upset at having to pay unfair parking fines. And – gasp - the Mayor granted an amnesty and discounted the tickets! Unbelievable! A Boston politician giving up income that was legally theirs? Something was clearly unbalanced in the Force.

Once again this week, the Greater Boston area is looking forward to a not-storm for several days: plenty of rain and snow, but temps in the mid-thirties; hence, no real accumulation, and not much positive for the winter weather lovers (albeit the mountains may do better for the skiers if it stays cold enough up there). Instead, snow is forecast across all sorts of places in the south and midwest that rarely ever see snow.

I’ve finally figured out what’s causing it.

It’s us.

The people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

It’s our fault. You know why?

We sent a Republican to fill Kennedy’s seat [1].

This winter’s weather is karmic payback for the imbalance in our local politics. Think about it – Boston area weather is a mess, but isn’t getting great snow (the one pretty & skiable saving grace of bad winters). On the other hand, DC and the Mid-Atlantic are getting pounded repeatedly – regularly stopping work in our Capitol. The connection’s pretty clear, I think.

[1] For those not fortunate enough to live in this Great Commonwealth, this is referring to the long-held US Senate seat of Ted Kennedy, which was recently won by the Republican Scott Brown in a special election held due to Kennedy’s death last year. And while Massachusetts has a history of electing the occasional Republican to local political offices, it has widely been seen as a staunchly Democratic state when it comes to Federal offices.

First off, apologies to various people I haven’t gotten back to recently, in particular M.G., M.M., and various ASF folks. I actually took vacation around the holidays, and spent several days not reading email at all (gasp!). First time in a long time, and then of course coming back to work is always hectic. Um, and of course setting up that that 360 with MW2 after the holiday hasn’t helped my free time any either. I hope to be more present this week.

• Check out the new Community Development project at Apache – great stuff, and don’t worry, the Mentoring Programme will accept Americans as well as English speakers.
• A shout out to the staff at Peet’s in Lexington, my favorite coffee shop.
• A shout out to the cashier and bagger at Whole Foods in Medford, who were wicked nice last Friday afternoon.
• Question: did I really miss anything important on Twitter over the past 3 weeks?
• What am I forgetting to put into my Monoprice order? I’m stocking up on cheap HDMI cables and wall ports for when we upgrade to a wall-mounted medium size flatscreen tv.
• Interesting read of a website: Letters of Note (via Writing Or Typing) Copies of just plain interesting letters from a variety of historical situations.
• Big thank-you to D.R. and others for getting Facebook to sponsor Apache!
• What Facebook-reading app do you use? I have just enough friends inside Facebook that I want to follow the witty conversations, but I’m really tired of the website. There must be better clients to watch the stream of interestingness go by.

What? You thought this was a year in review for last year? Sorry – just a cheap way to get all the little bits stuck in my head of this year so far cleared out so I can start the new year fresh.

A few somewhat odd things happened in the world of shipping this week here in Shaneville. It’s mind-boggling to think how many goods travel around the world every second with modern shipping companies. Sometimes, it doesn’t seem to make common sense.

• Ordering new winter tires from TireRack this Tuesday, I proceeded to the shipping stage. I was offered three choices of shipping – UPS, FedEx, and FedEx guaranteed 2 day. Guess which had both the lowest cost and earliest delivery date of the three? UPS, buy one or two days!
• Those same winter tires are already here. Working at home I heard some large thumps outside and went to investigate, and those magic UPS elves had already dropped the tires on my doorstep – barely 24 hours after UPS actually got the tires. It’s almost as if I had my own personal UPS delivery truck. (In this case, TireRack appeared to have a local regional supplier – makes sense for the northeast).
• Likewise a small electronics purchase I made on Monday and assembled in (yes, I know!) China, is currently in a FedEx airplane somewhere over the middle of the US. It’s only one more short step before tracking numbers have a little “show live map” feature, kind of like flight trackers. You could watch your package overfly you to the nearest shipper’s airport hub!

The two put together are also quite amusing, given that the tires – quite bulky – arrived far faster, even accounting for proportional distance – than the electronics will. So much for common sense.

Tip: several reliable friends have confirmed that ordering cheap HDMI cables is fine – no need to spend more than a couple of bucks for the vast majority of HDMI applications. I’ll be needing some of those in the after-Christmas shopping season at home, methinks.

Amused this morning when two adjacent spam emails were 1) a phishing spam for a bank, and 2) a purported anti-phishing security report. Imagine my disappointment when I opened the second and realized the Subject: line was bogus, and it was really some religious spam. Not as funny.

Dear #Lazyweb – it’s the holiday season, and there are a few simple electronics questions I have for you.

• Are Ethernet -> WiFi-G adapters really that expensive? I need a simple G wireless adapter for a DVD player that only has an Ethernet port. Isn’t there some option besides all the overpriced “wireless gaming adapters”? (And yes, if I am going to play FPS’s online, you can be sure I’m using a wire, just in case). Prefer Netgear, since that’s the router.
• Can anyone tell me what the exact ports on the back of a Sony XR-430 car radio are? I’d love to connect my iPod to my car stereo, and I know there are some RCA jacks on the back (from a fuzzy picture online), but I don’t want to actually pull the stereo out to plug in a 3.5mm plug -> RCA adapter to find out that they’re only outputs, not inputs. My CD changer is slowly dying, so I really need a better way to play iPod music in the car.
• Is there really that much difference in HDMI cables? I’m looking to upgrade to a medium size flatscreen – possibly a 37in at 1080 (that’s as big as will fit, I think), and I’m wondering if I really need one of the $50+ HDMI cables to stream videos, or if one of the cheaper ones (or one of the insanely cheap Amazon.com ones!) will work well enough.
• Home furnace electrical backup. We have a gas boiler for steam heat, and an older timed setback thermometer. When the power goes out, the gas stays on, as does the thermostat (and the water and water heater, nicely enough). But the boiler itself has a 120v circuit, so… no heat in the winter. Isn’t there some fairly simple way to hookup a battery backup for the boiler? It’s got a permanent pilot light, so what the heck does it need much power for other than sending the thermostat’s “yes” or “no” signal? If we could solve this, we could comfortably ride out any winter storm even without electricity. (Well, at least until all the laptop batteries die, that is!)

Thanks again #Lazyweb, and I hope you’re having a wonderful winter holiday season!

My current Excel registry policy settings prevent me from saving spreadsheets to any 1-2-3 file type. And making it doubly ironic, my current Lotus Symphony (the new one, not the original one) settings don’t include any 1-2-3 file type writers, either. Is this what over a decade of testing/building/coding 1-2-3 releases has brought me to?

So what deals are you looking for tomorrow on Black Friday? And how many people are actually going out to the store, versus just shopping online, especially with the large number of retailers promising similar prices?

And for the non-US readers out there: does anyone else have similar sales tomorrow, or is it completely restricted to the US? Just wondering how if anyone elsewhere was going to try to order something on sale from the Amazon US store for shipping elsewhere, for example.

Hey, where did the black friday boycott stuff go? Wasn’t there a move a while back to go all non-consumer instead in the past?